jkelly's blog
The Island of Lead-Based Toys
In 1964, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer debuted on television, and the special is still shown each year around the holidays. Burl Ives is the snowman narrator and sings some songs, and there’s an elf named Hermey who would rather be a dentist than make toys, and, of course, there’s Rudolph, whose dad covers up his bright red nose so the other reindeer won’t laugh and call him names. It’s a buddy movie, with Hermey and Rudolph hooking up when their perceived shortcomings are exposed, and they end up running away, whereupon they accidentally find the Island of Misfit Toys.
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Left foot out the driver’s side window
We couldn’t believe it. My wife and I were driving on the freeway, with the kids in the minivan, headed to a large toy store to buy expensive plastic play equipment for the yard, when we saw a small car passing us in the lane to our right. The young woman driving had her left foot hanging out the driver’s side window. In order to physically achieve this, her seat was reclined quite far back, and she could juuust barely see over her steering wheel. She was wearing shades and looked very relaxed. And she was wearing flip-flops, of course, or at least she was on her left foot.
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Sound like a big city
What makes a big city? In New York, you know it by what you see. It’s the mountain range of buildings that rise up in the spaces between the grid of surface streets. It’s the traffic exhaust, which ends up on the Kleenex when you blow your nose at night. It’s the sheer number of yellow Crown Vic cabs and black Lincoln limo sedans that pass you by.
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Be our leader, HelmetBoy
Let’s say it’s 1982, and we’re in a small town in Minnesota, where we find a kid who rides his bike every day. He rides to the park, he rides to his baseball games, he rides to the library, and he even rides to school when he can. One day, he randomly decides he’ll bicycle with a helmet on (perhaps he likes the look of it, perhaps he read in a medical journal that it was a good idea, whatever…), and off he goes.
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Garbage on the boulevard
Before the University of Minnesota replaced quarters with semesters, June was move-out month in the Como neighborhood. Students stacked garbage on boulevards in front of the houses they rented, which is exactly what the flyers from the Minneapolis sanitation department said not to do. Somehow it all got cleaned up, with a fine tacked onto many a city utility bill, and it stayed clean until everyone moved back in late September. Even if you weren’t a student, you couldn’t get away from it. That was, and continues to be, the rhythm of life in Como.
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Don't put me in a box
Put me in a box, and I’m going to fight my way out. In this case, I’m not talking about literally being put in a box – that would be weird and cartoonish – although if someone did physically stuff me into a box, my first priority would definitely be to escape, even if my hypothetical kidnappers were humane enough to poke air holes in the top and toss in a bologna sandwich.
Anyway, when I talk about being put in a box, I’m actually talking about being categorized, being told what I am and what I am not, being told what I can and cannot do. I know that we all do this in some form or another to make sense of our world (I’m this kind of person, you’re that kind of person, therefore we are or are not compatible…), but I have a distaste for the practice.
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Don't mess with baseball
One day on the radio, I heard someone say, “That George Bush sure can throw a baseball.” He even dared us to verify it on YouTube, even if we don’t like his politics. Sure enough, the man was right. GW can bear down and throw strikes. It shouldn’t really mean anything. GW has his hands full with other things right now. But throwing the first pitch at a baseball game can mean so much to we Americans because baseball means so much.
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Must be something in the water
If you pay attention a little too closely, you can choose to terrorize yourself with a laundry list of items these days. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, turn on the local TV news or read a local newspaper, and you’ll figure it out pretty quick. Candles and grassfires threaten to burn our houses down inside and out, genetic and environmental diseases are just waiting for nature or nurture to reveal themselves, and ex-cons and aspiring teenage criminals-in-training are casing our houses as we speak (the houses that aren’t already on fire).
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Fun is in my job description
I used to be the serious guy, the quiet guy, not the funny guy or the social guy or the party guy. Ask anyone who’s known me for a long time and that’s what they’ll say. So it’s surprising to me that, at age 32, I’ve somehow developed a reputation as the fun guy at work. Is it a personality transformation, the real me being revealed, or just the absence of teenage shyness and angst? I don’t know. I do know that the reason for the change might be more environmental than genetic, but we’ll get back to that.
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Romance at the Riverview
When I was a kid I saw Romancing the Stone six times at the New Prague movie theater. Six times. When I tell people that, they naturally have a lot of questions: Was this the series of events that set you on the path to being becoming a movie buff? Do you do this same sort of thing now? Didn't this seem a bit excessive, even at a young age? Did you know at the time how bad a movie Romancing the Stone really was? How was it that your parents allowed you to see this movie six times? Were they even aware of it, and if so, weren't they at least slightly disturbed?
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workaround
